Four Landmark Gold Loan Products, Two Decades, One Design Discipline, Now Available to Indian NBFCs Through Mannil Exim
From India’s 1% and 46 Paise Gold Loan schemes to Gold Loan Overdraft and a first-of-its-kind 14K scheme built in East Africa, one product-design discipline runs through all four
Kochi, India – 8 September 2026
Any NBFC founder choosing who designs their next Gold Loan product is really choosing a track record. Most Gold Loan schemes in India today are variations on a small set of established templates: a standard LTV band, a familiar interest structure, a disbursement process copied from whichever competitor is currently winning market share. Mannil Exim, a Kochi-based NBFC and Gold Loan consulting firm, argues that genuine differentiation in a crowded Gold Loan market comes from product design that starts with the customer problem rather than the nearest competitor’s brochure, and points to a two-decade track record behind four landmark products as its case.
Three products that shaped how India borrows against gold
The legacy starts with the 1% Gold Loan, a low-interest scheme built specifically to draw first-time borrowers into the category at a moment when Gold Loan penetration outside traditional customer segments was still limited. It continues with the 46 Paise Gold Loan, an ultra-low daily-interest product engineered for price-sensitive, short-tenure borrowing, a structure that required recalculating the economics of a Gold Loan around daily rather than monthly interest accrual. And it includes Gold Loan Overdraft facilities, which reworked the category’s default lump-sum disbursement model into a flexible drawdown line against pledged gold, letting customers borrow only what they needed, when they needed it. Mannil Exim’s Director & CEO, Liril Thomas Rajan, was part of the leadership teams behind each of the three.
The fourth product, and the hardest test of the discipline
The fourth product is where the underlying design discipline was tested without any of the scaffolding the first three could rely on. At Exim Bank, Comoros, East Africa, Rajan introduced the 14K Gold Loan, the first Gold Loan product built for a market with no existing Gold Loan industry, no appraisal convention, no competitor scheme to benchmark against, and no regulatory precedent written with gold-backed lending in mind. The mandate was his individually, built and delivered end to end without a local team or template to fall back on. Every element of the scheme, from the loan-to-value structure to the appraisal method to the branch-level process for verifying gold purity, had to be justified from first principles rather than adapted from an existing playbook.
“We were not trying to take over Gold Loan lending in Comoros, we were building one specific product, and nobody there had approached gold-backed lending that way before,” Rajan has said of the mandate. “Every decision, the LTV, the appraisal method, the branch layout, had to be justified from scratch. That is the same discipline behind every product we have built, whether the market was saturated with competition or had no category at all.”
Why product design is back on NBFC boardroom agendas
Gold Loan NBFCs across India are under renewed pressure to differentiate on product rather than price alone, as branch-level competition intensifies and customers increasingly compare schemes before choosing a lender. Mannil Exim’s Gold Loan Product Design & Structuring practice positions itself squarely inside that pressure point, working with NBFC boards and product teams through a defined process: a diagnostic review of the existing scheme or target customer segment, LTV and interest-slab calibration against the firm’s competitive positioning, disbursement-workflow design, and a structured rollout plan for the branch network. The practice treats a Gold Loan scheme as a system of interlocking decisions rather than a single interest-rate number to be set and forgotten.
That two-decade discipline, tested across four products and two very different kinds of markets, one saturated with competition, one with no category at all, is what Mannil Exim now brings to Indian NBFCs, whether a client is launching a first Gold Loan product or rebuilding one that has gone stale.
LAUNCHING OR REFRESHING A GOLD LOAN PRODUCT?
Mannil Exim’s Gold Loan Product Design & Structuring practice covers scheme structuring, LTV calibration, interest slab design and disbursement workflow, for a first product launch or a redesign of an existing scheme. NBFC founders and product teams can inquire directly.
Liril Thomas Rajan, Director & CEO, Mannil Exim | Phone: +91-9562977995 | Email: mannilexim@zohomail.in | Web: www.mannilexim.com | LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/liril-thomas-rajan
